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Despite the attempts to spin the results by folks quoted in the article, this is the evidence for a spread of a maritime culture into Africa from the Middle East.Ancient Humans Took Up Coastal LifeScientists say they have discovered the earliest well-dated example of an oyster bar: a fossil reef on Africa's Red Sea coast where ancestral humans apparently waded out to collect oysters, clams and crabs some 125,000 years ago... A site in South Africa also shows signs that ancient humans lived along a coast and harvested shellfish. The researchers noted evidence that this site is 10,000 years younger than the Eritrea site.
125,000 Years Ago, Study Suggests
AP
May 3, 2000
On the way into Africa, a nomadic family experienced the loss of a child...The Ancient Tomb of a Young ChildNow a Belgian archeological team has found the skeleton of a child in the Nile Valley of southern Egypt that may be as much as 80,000 years old. The site may well be Africa's oldest intentional burial... Pierre Vermeersch from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and his colleagues discovered the skeleton at Taramsa Hill. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans and more ancient hominids visited Taramsa to make stone tools, and Vermeersch had been tracking the progress of this industry... Though many stone tools were found near the body, none can be clearly associated with the burial. "We are in a place where they made hundreds of thousands of tools," says Vermeersch, "so everywhere, everything is full of artifacts." ...The slender bones and rounded forehead are clearly those of a modern human. The teeth and skull also resemble those of equally old human remains in both East Africa and the Middle East and suggest a connection, Vermeersch says, between these two populations.
Discover
November 1998